[December 2nd]

The Scourging at the Pillar

My go-to meditation for this mystery (if nothing else, this exercise is pointing out what a rut I’m in) is how before we could kill God, we had to prove that He was human – that He could bleed, that this Jesus was just a man after all. We had to bring Him down to our level to make him killable.

But maybe it was the opposite going on that day. There is so much rage at God these days, maybe in every age, that it must be cathartic to think of punishing, of beating, not a man claiming to be a god but God Himself – take out on Him what a shitty system we often believe He has made for us.

Maybe He loves us enough to give us that. The great Lash-Out in His eternal love story with mankind. Like a lover who will let you beat at his or her chest until you settle and can hear that there is a world beyond your rage and pain. Willing to take that rage on His back and bear it.

This event cries out, to me, for some explanation like that because it wasn’t necessary for Salvation the way that Jesus’s death was. The scourging is initially presented as a substitute for Jesus’s civil penalty of execution, but it doesn’t, in the end, prevent the crucifixion. Maybe suffering has to come first – the new body of Jesus free of all of its scars, was as much a victory over violence and despair and victimhood and permanent damage both mental and physical as the resurrected Body itself was a victory over death.

But maybe, as a part of the last theory or not, what He was trying to show us was that pain doesn’t change anything. That suffering is neither good for the soul nor an irrevocable mark upon it. Trauma and scars are realities that mar any approximation of what we might have had in Eden, but we give them too much power. We give them the power to shape us so much they define us, explain us, even constitute us. They have no more power than death.

We have as many issues with pain, with suffering and sorrow as a tool for growth or wrong to be eradicated, as we do with death itself. I tend to think that the Scourging was Him making a separate point – that Pain was as temporary and illusory as Death. That He was conquering both on our behalf because we gave them so much power we could no longer defeat them ourselves.

Pain matters no more in the final analysis than death.

It’s almost losing something comforting – an excuse, a future reward for present suffering, a consolation that pain makes us better people, the power that can be wielded in victimhood. But perhaps, like death, the enduring, the method of dealing with the pain, is all. Maybe that’s what He was trying to show us.